A professor at Stony Brook University argued last week that black men shouldn’t be allowed to speak in public until they have studied black feminist literature.
“I don’t think black men should be allowed to speak about race in public without having first studied black feminism but that’s just me..,” Fleming wrote. She followed it up with a similar, more broad, tweet. “Amend that: I don’t think black men should be allowed to speak about ANYTHING in public without first studying black women’s work.”
Although Fleming’s tweet may have been a case of hyperbole, Twitter users immediately fired back. One user even accused Fleming of “some sort of sickness.” That tweet received over 200 likes.
Fleming’s biography on her faculty page states that her work primarily focuses on issues of racism around the globe. A large portion of her scholarship focuses on white supremacy and racial conflict. She has published two books on the topic.
My research examines how people of African descent conceptualize and respond to racial oppression in multiple national settings. My first book Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France (Temple University Press, 2017) uses critical race theory to significantly advance scholarship on racism in France and Europe. The book marshals ethnographic data, archival research and in-depth interviews with French activists and descendants of slaves to analyze how social actors construct racial temporality through collective memories and commemoration of enslavement and abolition.